How Can I Reach Inbox Zero Every Day?

As impossible as it may sound, Inbox Zero isn’t just a dream. It’s something you can do every day whether you’re dealing with work or personal email, and PubMatic CEO Rajeev Goel has some fantastic advice you’ll want to take note of.

If you’re not familiar with the mythical concept, Inbox Zero means reading and responding to every email you receive – which makes Goel’s achievement even more impressive, considering he’s a CEO and undoubtedly gets plenty of emails.

The executive has earned a company-wide reputation for reading and responding to everything he gets via email, Fast Company reports. He shared some of his tips with the website, which everyone could use for improving their email game.

Goel says that you shouldn’t think of email as work. Instead, email facilitates work. “You can never work on your inbox and think that because you have cleared it out, you have completed your work,” he said.

He also notes that you should start your day by scanning your inbox to delete the emails you need to read but don’t have to act upon, and that will clear out most of the clutter. Users should also end their days by replying to urgent emails, and leaving everything else for the next day’s to-do list.

In fact, Goel said that it’s better to avoid answering some emails too quickly, especially the non-urgent ones, as they’ll simply bring on more emails.

Other tricks Goel uses for reaching Inbox Zero include grouping emails together by conversation so that the entire email exchange on a topic is easy to follow, and collecting emails from the same person so that they can all be dealt with at the same time, either via email, a face-to-face chat or a phone call.

As you can see, reaching Inbox Zero can be done without actually replying to each and every email, if you follow Goel’s guidelines. You can also check out these tips if you want to improve your email workflow.